Recipient of the 1992
Ted Ward Writing Award on
"The Christian Mission in Higher Education"
=====================================
Worldviews, Modernity and
the Task of Christian College Education
+ Brian J. Walsh +
Senior Member in Worldview Studies
Institute for Christian Studies
"Worldviews" and North American Evangelical Scholarship
The ascendancy of "worldview" language as part and
parcel of the vocabulary of the intellectual evangelical
community in North America is intriguing. It is intriguing
because apart from anthropologists describing non-Western
cultures, "worldview" language has not been a dominant motif
in the North American academic tradition. As the Germanic
origin of the term suggests, Weltanschauung has a European
pedigree and it is fair to say that the dominant formative
forces in North American evangelicalism are mostly domestic
or British, with European thought having less influence.
In this light, a significant question is: "How did
evangelicals pick up this language and, more importantly,
begin to integrate the whole notion of worldview into their
thought and, indeed, discipleship?" The historian of North
American evangelicalism, George Marsden, might have an
answer to this question. In his plenary keynote address in
June 1987, at the conference entitled, "A New Agenda for
Evangelical Thought," held at Wheaton College, Marsden spoke
of "the triumph of Kuyperian presuppositionalism" in the
1
North American evangelical scholarly community. Marsden
describes this Kuyperianism as
. . . a style of Christian thought that emphasizes
that crucial to the differences that separate
Christian worldviews from non-Christian ones are
disagreements about pretheoretical first
principles, presuppositions, first commitments or
basic beliefs. Thus, without denying the value of
human rational-ity, it denies the autonomy or
competence of reason alone to adjudicate some of
the decisive questions concerning the context
within which rationality itself will operate.
This viewpoint can be contrasted with the older
common sense Baconian tradition that once
dominated American evangelical thought. That
tradition assumed that there was only one
objective science for all people and hence that
ultimately there could be no real distinction
between Christian thinking and clear thinking.
Christianity, they thought, should therefore be
able to win its case on rational or scientific
grounds.
The prevailing view now emphasizes that
Christian thought and non-Christian thought, being
founded on some opposed first principles, reflect
wide differences in total worldviews.1
Insofar as North American evangelicals are talking
about worldviews and thinking "worldviewishly"
(Weltanschauunglich), they are standing in the tradition of
the 19th-century Dutch theologian, statesman and journalist,
Abraham Kuyper.2 Kuyper was one of the first theologians to
apply the notion of worldview to both Christian theoretical
or scientific activity and to Christian socio-cultural
analysis and action. When Carl Henry spoke of the need to
challenge the controlling presuppositions of the secular
mind and clearly to articulate a Christian "world and life
view" in his 1947 work, The Uneasy Conscience of Modern
Fundamentalism,3 he was directly indebted to the tradition
of Kuyper.4 And now a historian the stature of George
2
Marsden says that this Kuyperian emphasis on worldviews is
the prevailing view in North American evangelicalism.
More recently than Henry, of course, the whole notion
of worldview came into the evangelical vocabulary through
Francis Schaeffer5 who, in turn, influenced people like
James Sire in his book, The Universe Next Door.6 And while
Schaeffer's own fundamentalism made him very skeptical of
the tradition of Kuyper, it takes little historical
imagination to note his own indebtedness to this tradition.
It was, after all, the neo-Kuyperian art historian Hans
Rookmaaker who introduced Schaeffer to worldview thinking.
While I am not so sure that Marsden is right when he
says that this kind of Kuyperian worldview thinking is the
prevailing view in North America, as a person who
consciously stands in that Kuyperian tradition, I am
flattered that he thinks so. The point here is not to boast
of any "triumph" of this tradition but simply to note this
historical connection and to confess a sense of profound
gratitude that this tradition of Christian thought and
cultural witness has been able to make such a contribution
to North American evangelical scholarship and social
witness.
What is a Worldview?
The fact that evangelicals are talking more about
worldviews does not necessarily mean that they are all
talking about the same thing, however. If one were to
survey the various ways in which the term "worldview" has
3
been used in Christian literature since Henry's 1947 book,
one would likely be able to categorize those various
functional meanings according to the worldviews of those
employing the term. While it is not my intent to provide
such a survey here, there is at least one observation that
is worth making about how evangelicals tend to use the term.
The term worldview is often used by evangelicals as a
synonym for theology, and that theology is still understood
in the Protestant scholastic sense of a series of dogmatic
propositions coherently organized and rooted in a divinely
inspired, infallible and inerrant Scripture. This is, I
think, the heart of Schaeffer's use of the term, and would
seem to characterize the work of scholars like Norman
Geisler and William Watkins.7 In a modified form such a
theologization (or at least intellectualization) can be
detected in Jim Sire's early book. One notes in The
Universe Next Door that Sire deals with worldviews primarily
as systems of thought, as theoretical constructs. He seldom
addresses the question of how worldviews work, what they do,
or what the cultural fruit of a particular worldview might
be.8 It should be said, however, that his more recent
Discipleship of the Mind has gone a long way towards
correcting this deficiency.9
While the notion of worldview has a varied history,
beginning with Kant in 1790, picked up via Fichte by
Schelling, Schleiermacher, Hegel and Goethe and then on to
Rickert, Wildebrand and Dilthey, one of the most common
4
features of the term's use (Engels being a notable
exception) has been that worldviews are pre-theoretical in
character.10 A Weltanschauung is a global anschauung, that
is, a view, outlook, perspective in life and the world that
characterizes a people or a culture.
Such an anschauung is distinct from philosophy and
science because it is held by all people regardless of their
intellectual capabilities. Consequently, a worldview is
non-theoretical and, if interpreted positively, it is seen
to be pre-theoretical in the precise sense of being the very
foundation of all theorizing.11 If interpreted negatively
(as in Comte's positivism), worldview denotes the
unscientific view of the unenlightened masses or primitive
people.
It is this non-theoretical character of worldviews that
made the idea so attractive to anthropologists. A. Irving
Hallowell coined the term "ethno-metaphysics" to describe
the exploration and analysis of various cultures.12
Worldview seemed an appropriate category for anthropologists
because so-called primitive people clearly had a set of
conceptual presuppositions that functioned in an integrative
way in their culture, yet these conceptual presuppositions
were not theoretical in character. They were not anything
like what we in the West called philosophy or science. In
fact, they bore more relation to what we describe as myth.
But if non-Western peoples led their lives and formed
their cultures in terms of a worldview articulated in the
5
form of myth, could it not be the case that Western culture
was also founded in a worldview, in a mythos? Many
sociologists, historians and theologians have answered this
question affirmatively. Langdon Gilkey is here
representative:
Social existence involves and depends on a shared
consciousness, a shared system of meanings. This
shared system of meanings is structured by symbols
that shape or express the understanding of
reality, of space and time, of human being and its
authenticity, of life and its goods, of
appropriate relations, roles, customs and
behaviour, symbols which together constitute the
unique gestalt, the identity or uniqueness, of
that social group. To be a member of any
community is to be aware of, to participate in,
and to be oneself shaped, energized, and directed
by this common symbolic mythos.13
This shared consciousness, this shared system of meanings
that gives rise to a historical way-of-being-in-the-world,
and which constitutes the identity of a particular group,
people or culture, is what we are trying to get at when we
talk about a worldview.
One of the most helpful articles that I have read on
worldviews is by James Olthuis, simply titled, "On
Worldviews."14 Olthuis describes a worldview as "a
framework or set of fundamental beliefs through which we
view the world and our calling and future in it. It is the
integrative and interpretative framework by which order and
disorder are judged, the standard by which reality is
managed and pursued."15 A worldview, then, is a vision of
life. It provides its adherents with a vision of the world,
a perspective through which to make sense of life.
6
Further, because the world is temporal, in process, a
worldview always entails a story, a myth which provides its
adherents with an understanding of their own role in the
global history of good and evil. Such a story tells us who
we are in history and why we are here.16 The way in which
American history is taught to children and proclaimed on the
political campaign trail is a good example of such a mythos.
The worldview of the "American Dream" is the official and
orthodox worldview of the United States and is proclaimed
with equal conviction by both Democrats and Republicans.
This worldview is rooted in the Enlightenment "progress
myth." This myth is something of a secularized
Heilsgeschicte which "sees history, beginning way back with
Egypt and Greece, as a story of cumulative development
leading up to modern times temporally and to Western culture-
especially America-spatially."17 Here and now, with us, the
goal towards which this story has led has been, or at least
is being fulfilled. Scholars as diverse as Christopher
Dawson, Reinhold Niebuhr, Bob Goudzwaard and J. B. Bury have
described this as the myth that governs our common
existence.18 Again, Langdon Gilkey's description of the
role of the myth of progress in our lives proves to be
illuminating:
It helps us determine what is creative and what is
not in the world, and what our own priorities are
or should be. It tells us what to defend and why
we defend it. It gives meaning to our work,
confidence in the midst of failure, and hope in
the face of tragedy or of temporary
discouragement. It helps us to distinguish good
7
from evil forces in the world around us, and gives
us confidence in the ultimate victory of good over
evil in history. Above all, it tells us who we
are in history and why we are here. It forms the
ultimate set of presuppositions for most of our
aims and so for our patterns of education.19
This leads us to another dimension of worldviews. A
vision of the world and of history is always a normative
vision. A worldview is always a foundation for
socio-cultural action-it is always a vision for the world.
It tells us both what is the case (vision of the world) and
what ought to be the case (vision for the world).20 As
anthropologist Clifford Geertz notes, worldviews are both
descriptive and normative.21 For example, if a culture's
worldview includes a view of economic life as guided by
self-interest, of land as a commodity which can be bought,
sold, subdivided and exploited, of history as progress
defined as ever-increasing scientific mastery and
technological control, of work as a disutility, of the
environment as disposable, of happiness as consumptive
satiation, and of government as the guarantor of such
satiation, then that worldview will have definite (and
usually devastating) ramifications for economic life, for
the land, for historical development, for our work lives,
for the environment, for the emotional well-being of its
adherents, and for political life. And these
historico-cultural ramifications would be drastically
different in, let's say, a native North American worldview
in which economic life is concerned with maintaining the
necessities of life for the community; land is viewed as
8
Mother; history is entrustment; work is an integral part of
a subsistence, land-based, labor-intensive lifestyle; the
environment is a gift of the Great Spirit and an inheritance
from the past; happiness is found by living in harmony with
nature and with one's clan and by learning the wisdom of the
animals imparted through the stories of the elders; and
community leadership (or government) is communal and tribal.
We can see, then, that a vision of life is always a
vision for life: it bears cultural fruit, it is
inculturated, taking on historico-cultural flesh-for good or
evil. It characterizes the distinct historical Úlan of a
particular culture or people. As James Fowler puts it, a
worldview is the way one "leans into life."22 Never a
matter of interesting speculation, a worldview, not unlike
the leaven of the Gospel, permeates and flavors one's whole
life.
It is also important to note that worldviews are
religious in character. They are frameworks of beliefs but
these beliefs are not theoretical in character. Such
beliefs cannot be argued to on the basis of either inductive
or deductive reasoning-rather, they are the very foundation
of such arguments. Worldview beliefs are more likely argued
from than argued to.23
A worldview is rooted in beliefs that are ultimate in
character because these beliefs are answers to what Stephen
Toulmin has called "limit" questions.24 Such questions are
at the limits of our rationality or, to change the metaphor,
9
they are the ground of our rationality. Their answers
provide us with what Nicholas Wolterstorff has described as
"control beliefs."25 It is at this level that Wittgenstein
says, "If I have exhausted the justifications, I have
reached bedrock and my spade is turned. Then I am inclined
to say, 'This is simply what I do.'"26
In The Transforming Vision, Richard Middleton and I,
like Toulmin, Gilkey, Sire, Holmes and others before us,
attempt to list the kind of questions that can legitimately
be described as worldview questions.27 We proposed that
there are at least four questions that are simply
constitutive to human life and that are implicitly answered
in one way or another in all worldviews and, therefore,
which guide all human culture forming. They are: 1) Where
am I, or what is the nature of the reality in which I find
myself? 2) Who am I, or what is the nature of human being?
How do we relate to non-human reality? How do we relate to
each other (as male and female, as different races,
different cultures and different generations)? And, what is
our relation to the divine (if any)? 3) What's wrong?
Since we all recognize that something is amiss in life, that
life is out of balance, disordered and broken-in short, that
there is evil-we are all forced to find some way to account
for, or at least understand, this brokenness. 4) What's the
remedy? How do we find a path through our brokenness to
wholeness? Wherein is the hope that gives us the strength
to continue to live and to expect a better day? Since all
10
worldviews entail an answer to this question, all worldviews
are soteriological and eschatological in one way or another.
Such ultimate questions require ultimate answers, and
answers that are characterized by ultimacy are faith
answers. One's worldview, then, and indeed the worldview of
a whole culture, is rooted in a faith stance-a stance in
relation to that which is taken to be ultimate, an "ultimate
concern."28 From a Christian perspective, this ultimacy
will either be appropriately directed to the one who is
Ultimate-our Creator revealed to us in Jesus Christ-or to a
pseudo-ultimacy, a pseudo-god, an idol.29
At this point our description of worldviews remains
incomplete. We have seen how worldviews are foundational
for human culture-they are visions of and for life which are
themselves founded in an ultimate faith stance.
Consequently, we have seen the following pattern of
relationships:
faith _ worldview _ way of life
(ultimate answers to(storied vision of (socio-historical
cultural
ultimate questions) and for life) patterns in community)
[Weltanschauung] [Lebenswelt]
The problem with this diagram is that the arrows only
go in one direction, whereas the relation of faith,
worldview and way of life is, in fact, not unidirectional.
Rather, they are in a reciprocal relation. In other words,
a worldview depends for its validation not only on its
underlying faith30 but also on the way of life that it
engenders-whether the worldview really does open up,
11
illuminate and integrate life in all of its dimensions or
not.31
Olthuis describes this reciprocal relation when he says
that a worldview "is a medium through which the ultimate
commitment of faith plays out its leading and integrating
role in daily life. Simultaneously, a worldview is a medium
by which daily life can either call faith into question or
confirm it."32 Consequently, the arrows go both ways:
faith ˇ worldview ˇ way of life
If a worldview is a vision of life and for life, then life
itself must have some meaningful input into the worldview.
Indeed, it must be able, in principle, even to change the
worldview, and such change could mean change in the faith
which is the very foundation of the worldview. All of the
dimensions of reality that comprise a way of life (which
include societal institutions such as government, education,
business, gender relations, family structures and
child-rearing patterns, race and even geography and climate)
are formative of a culture's worldview-just as that worldview
(and its underlying faith) is formative of those cultural
patterns. The relation is reciprocal, perhaps even
dialectical.
What Paul Ricoeur calls the "hermeneutics of suspicion"
has legitimately shown us that a way of life could be rooted
in a distorted perception of life (or worldview) that is
itself rooted in either personal/cultural neuroses (Freud)
or oppressive societal ideologies (Marx).33 Indeed, a
12
worldview could be an ideological or neurotic justification
for a certain way of life. This would be a distortion in
the normative faith/worldview/way of life relation. But at
certain points such neurotic distortions and ideological
oppressions can, through various means, be brought to light.
When this happens a new worldview framework is required
(among other things) to account for the new perception of
reality. If the worldview shift is radical enough it may
even entail a conversion on the most fundamental religious
level. People in both psycho-therapeutic and revolutionary
contexts often speak of such conversions.34
Another way in which we can see the reciprocity in the
faith/worldview/way of life relation, which is less
theoretical, is to comment on a reality shared by all
self-aware human beings, namely the experience that there is
in fact a gap between our worldview (and ultimately our most
firmly held faith commitments) and our way of life. The
awareness of that gap leads us to evaluate our lives, but
also, especially during times of crisis, to evaluate our
worldview and our faith.35 Insofar as this gap is
experienced as the inevitable tension between a normative
vision of life and the present unfulfilled fallen character
of our real existence (what we might call the "Romans 7 gap"-
the "I-do-not-do-what-I
want-but-I-do-the-very-thing-that-I-hate" gap) then it
should function as a creative tension in our lives. Such a
tension should be able to militate against the neuroses and
13
ideologies mentioned above. But if the gap between our
worldview and our actual experience becomes too great-if
actual experience seems totally unrelated to our worldview-
then we have a worldview crisis on our hands. And a
worldview crisis gives rise to what Clifford Geertz has
described as "the gravest sort of anxiety."36 In such a
situation the very ground on which you stand is uncertain,
you are no longer sure of who you are, what the meaning of
life is, what you are to do or where you are going.
Ultimate questions that once had some form of ultimate,
faith-committed answers are reopened and such a reopening is
usually horrific.37
Worldview Crisis: Reformation, Conversion or Entrenchment
When such a crisis occurs within the dominant worldview
in a culture, the very scaffolding on which the culture
stands begins to collapse. Jeremy Rifkin describes this in
terms of a wide-spread cultural angst:
When a particular worldview begins to break down,
when it can no longer adequately answer the basic
questions to the satisfaction of its adherents,
faith is broken, uncertainty and confusion set in,
and the individual and the masses are cast adrift-
exposed, unprotected and above all frightened.38
It is my view that the culture of modernity, the
culture animated by the progress myth, is presently entering
into such a crisis period.39 Robert Heilbroner, in his
trenchant and disturbing book, An Inquiry into the Human
Prospect40 says we have come to the end of the
Enlightenment. The Enlightenment dream of progress which
will inevitably result in "le perfectionnement de l'homme"
14
(Condorcet), that believed that "the Golden Age lies ahead
of us not behind us" (Dewey) and that it is attainable
through the autonomous exercise of human reason translated
into technological power and economic abundance, has been
proven not only to be an illusion, but is also dangerous.
It not only lied to us about the world and ourselves, it has
cursed us and cursed future generations.41 Consequently,
the late George Grant wondered whether the whole experiment
of modernity might not have been a mistake.42 And Daniel
Bell was right when he said that "the real problem of
modernity is the problem of belief." Bell went on to say,
"To use an unfashionable term, it is a spiritual crisis,
since the new anchorages have proved illusory and the old
ones have become submerged."43
Consequently, the question that Bell and many of our
most sensitive social analysts is forced to ask is: What
holds one to reality if one's secular system of meanings
proves to be an illusion?"44 In other words, when a chasm
has developed between one's faith and worldview and the
reality of one's life, what is one to do?
There are perhaps three possible responses. One
response is reformation. The reality of life leads an
individual or a community to a refocusing or a reforming of
their worldview. At best, this refocusing can occur in such
a way that the initial faith is left mostly intact. In fact
it might even appear that the reformation brings the
worldview even closer in line with the founding faith.45
15
Indeed when such refocusing is occurring one often hears
debates about the content of the founding faith.46
For example, at least part of the success of the civil
rights movement in the United States is because those who
have attempted to shift or refocus the American dream-or the
American civil religion-or the American worldview-have done so
by arguing that the reality of racism, even a racism
embedded in the American worldview, conflicts with both what
we experience to be just and with the vision of freedom and
equality of the founding fathers. Whether the vision of the
founding fathers was emancipatory or not I leave to
historical judgment, but arguing that it was, or even that
racial equality was implicit in their vision and needs to be
enacted explicitly, made the message of the civil rights
movement convincing to a large segment of the population.
In other words, the refocusing of the worldview (in this
case the liberalization of the worldview) is occasioned by
an intolerable social reality and legitimated by wrapping
the message in the American flag and waving the
Constitution.
Sometimes, however, such a worldview reformation is not
possible because the gap between reality and worldview is
simply too great and the worldview seems to be compounding
the problems, not being a creative source of their solution.
In such a situation, a culture (or at least sensitive
members of a culture who do not allow their worldview to be
ideologically co-opted into further legitimation of
16
intolerable socio-historical conditions) suffers a crisis of
confidence and identity. And as the worldview suffers
collapse, the entire world seems to come crashing down with
it. It is at this point that all reformations and
adaptations seem to be mere window dressing, not really
addressing the fundamental problems. And then one is open
to the second option, namely, conversion-the abandonment of
one worldview for another. In other words, the reality
which has discredited a particular worldview also dismantles
the faith which underlies that worldview. And because it is
impossible both to live a human life without faith, and to
have a culture-directing-and-forming worldview without a
faith foundation for that worldview, one is necessarily set
on a quest for a new faith.47
The widespread fascination with the New Age
consciousness movement in our time is indicative of the
sense of lostness and betrayal of many people in our
post-Enlightenment culture. Such people are looking for a
new faith. They are ripe for conversion. And any of us who
have had deep doubts about our own faith (or indeed who have
experienced conversion) know what such a spiritual quest is
like.
There is, however, a third possible response to a
worldview crisis. It is perhaps the most prevalent and, in
the context of a declining culture such as ours, the most
dangerous. It is what we could describe as entrenchment.
In a time of crisis we often witness a conservative backlash
17
and entrenchment. Rather than creatively dealing with the
crisis, cultures (and individuals) tend to dig in their
heels and hang on to what they've got. A survivalist
mentality emerges, and we witness a culture-wide
recommitment to the very worldview and the very faith that
seems to be discredited by one's historical reality. At
times such a recommitment takes on the character of a
revival service-"give me that old time religion of faith in
human progress and the American dream of life, liberty and
the pursuit of happiness."
Listen to the liberal optimism of futurist Herman Kahn:
On the whole . . . this problem-prone,
super-industrial period will be marked by rising
living standards and less rather than more
sacrifice. Eventually, almost all of the problems
will be dealt with reasonably satisfactorily, so
that at the end of the transition period, the true
post-industrial society can emerge.48
There is still hope that the secular eschaton will dawn.
And the neo-conservative revival seems to be a right-wing
version of this same secular hope. "If only we can hold off
the feminists, stamp out abortion, calm down the
environmentalists, deregulate business-give it full reign,
and break down trade barriers, then surely our cultural woes
will be over and the rest of the world's problems will go
away." Personally, I find it easier to believe in a literal
six-day creation some 6,000 years ago and Jonah being
swallowed by a big fish, than to believe that the very
cultural belief system that got us into our trouble will now
rescue us from it.
Sadly, this stance of entrenchment has characterized
18
much of the cultural response of evangelicalism. Many of
the calls "back" to the Judeo-Christian heritage of our
culture, which we hear from many an
evangelical/fundamentalist pulpit, are, in fact, thinly
veiled calls to recommit ourselves to the Western worldview
and way of life that is presently crumbling. Perhaps the
biggest problem with developing a Christian cultural
response and an integrally Christian educational perspective
in our cultural malaise is that Christians are often at the
forefront of defending the status quo of the dominant way of
life. How else can we understand the perverse, if not
heretical, gospel of wealth doctrine combined with a fierce
ideological, if not idolatrous, American nationalism that
characterizes almost all of the televangelists and most
fundamentalist churches? Certainly such Christians want to
oppose certain elements in our culture because of their
Christian faith (like abortion, pornography and liberalized
education), yet they still want to conserve some of its
central features (technological superiority and military
power, a commodity-oriented lifestyle in the context of a
growth-oriented economy, a rapacious attitude toward
creation, and an unjust, often racist attitude toward our
Two-Thirds World brothers and sisters). Such a stance is, I
submit, schizophrenic (believing that one can indeed serve
two masters) and spiritually bankrupt. In place of this
Christianity-legitimated cultural entrenchment we need a
radically comprehensive cultural vision. In the next
19
section I will attempt to sketch out the contours of what
such a vision might look like.
A Christian Worldview in a Declining Culture
While it is not possible to discuss here with any
exhaustiveness the nature and role of a radically
comprehensive worldview in the context of our present
cultural crisis, I will present fourteen theses for
consideration.
1) A Christian worldview is only Christian insofar as
it is biblical. I take it as a fundamental given that the
Scriptures are foundational to a Christian worldview. The
Bible answers for us the ultimate worldview questions. They
tell us where we are (in God's good creation); who we are
(God's covenantal image-bearers called to stewardly
service); what is wrong (we have broken the covenant with
our Creator and chosen to serve and image idols rather than
being his image-bearers); and what is the remedy (Jesus
Christ, the incarnate image of God has died and risen again
in order to reclaim God's creation and his rightful
image-bearers-thereby establishing his Kingdom).
The Scriptures are a worldview book telling the story
of God's relation to us and to all of creation-a dramatic
story of creation, lostness and rescue which becomes our
story and the basis of our identity as the people of God
when we turn to Jesus Christ in faith.
2) A biblical worldview is one which understands
creation, fall and redemption in comprehensive terms. All
20
of reality is creaturely, all of creation is distorted by
human disobedience, and Jesus Christ comes to restore all
things.49 Consequently, the biblical worldview is truly a
worldview-all of reality falls within its compass.
3) The tradition of dualism, rooted in the
neo-Platonic subversion of the Gospel and reaching a new
height of expression in North American evangelical pietism,
undercuts or shortcircuits the dynamics of the Gospel by
privatizing Christian faith, thereby failing to grasp or be
grasped by the world-transforming power of a biblical
worldview.50 Consequently,
4) North American evangelicalism has generally
shortchanged itself of the worldview resources of its own
Scriptures. Reading the text dualistically we have not been
able to see how the Scriptures address our culture. We have
been left with an infallible and inerrant, though also
irrelevant, text. Therefore,
5) North American evangelicalism has de facto been
taken captive by the dominant secular worldview and is,
therefore, as much a part of the problem in the present
crisis as it is part of the solution.51
6) A Christian worldview in a culture which views
nature as mere resource for human exploitation and which is
coming perilously close to a major environmental crisis,
needs to be firmly rooted in the goodness of God's creation.
We are to love, protect and heal the creation because it is
God's not ours-the work of his wise and loving hand and the
21
object of his redeeming work. Wanton destruction of
ecosystems is not only unwise, it is a sin against the
Creator and a belittling of Christ's sacrifice on the
cross.52
7) In a culture based on self-interested greed and
competition, a biblical worldview insists that God's
image-bearers are called to stewardly care for the earth,
reaping its fruit for the benefit of all of the earth's
inhabitants. Such a call to stewardship entails a call to
an economics of care and equality.
8) In a culture still hanging on to the worn-out
Enlightenment ideals of human progress, a biblical worldview
provides a more sober estimate of human culture-forming.
Such an estimate is rooted in the biblical understanding of
idolatry. Those who do not image their Creator, necessarily
image a creature or dimension of creaturely life. Such
idolatry results in death-personally, spiritually and
culturally. Therefore,
9) A Christian worldview provides the basis for a
prophetic critique of the dominant worldview's idolatry. In
our context this requires a dismantling of the false trinity
of scientism, technicism and economism.53
10) Such prophetic critique must begin with the
household of faith. By dualistically limiting the Gospel to
a narrow dimension of life, the church has tacitly adopted
the idols of the false trinity in most areas of life.
Consequently, the church is, to an alarming degree, held
22
captive by the dominant worldview.
11) A prophetic worldview must also go beyond critique
to setting the cultural imagination of the church free to
embrace new ways of living and to embody an alternative
reality.54 Concretely, dreams of the Kingdom must replace
the American dream. The biblical worldview must energize us
(fill us with the Spirit) so that we can begin to walk in
new paths of discipleship.
12) In the Scriptures being energized in such a way
that we discern new paths of obedience in creation is called
Wisdom. Wisdom is God's loving way with the creation and to
be wise is to celebrate and be at-home in God's good
creation and to follow that way-it is to discern a path and a
direction for our discipleship.
13) In a culture that has no normative foundation
beyond individualistic rights and utilitarianism, a biblical
worldview insists that God's world is a normed world. God's
creation is subject to norms or a creational torah that
leads to the fulfillment and healing of life. Disobedience
results in death. Consequently, in place of economic
self-interest, Christians will strive for an economics of
sharing and care; competitive individualism is replaced is
replaced by community cooperation; an economics of
exploitation gives way to an economics of stewardship;
unceasing economic growth is replaced by a contented
lifestyle of "enough"; and in the face of an oppressive
politics of power and control, Christians will seek justice
23
through service and cross-bearing. These are some of the
norms of the Kingdom. To live out of such norms would be
culturally subversive.
14) In a culture that believes that only human progress
will bring the Kingdom
(= secular utopia), a biblical worldview firmly, yet
lovingly, proclaims that only God brings the Kingdom, and he
does so on a cross. We are not called to bring the Kingdom
but simply to erect obedient signposts of the Kingdom. In a
time of cultural anxiety the Christian's deepest source of
hope is that "the kingdoms of this world will become the
Kingdom of our God and of his Christ. And he shall reign
for ever and ever." (Revelation 11:15)
The Calling of A Christian Liberal Arts College
I will conclude this paper with a few "thesis-like"
remarks on the significance of this analysis of the nature
of worldviews and the power of the biblical worldview in a
declining culture for the life and mission of a Christian
liberal arts college. Perhaps these comments are something
less than theses. Let's call them "tentative proposals."
1) All education is rooted in a worldview and all
education nurtures students in that worldview. More
specifically, however, the college stage of life (between
the ages of 18 to 22) is a crucial and pivotal stage in
one's worldview development. It is at this stage that young
people make life decisions and career choices that
implicitly or explicitly affirm for themselves the worldview
24
of their upbringing and of their culture (or subculture), or
begin along another path which either denies and abandons
the worldview of their parents or significantly refocuses
and reforms that worldview. Therefore, a Christian liberal
arts college should take formative participation and
guidance in that late adolescent process of worldview
formation as its central educational calling and task.
2) In the historical context of a church that is held
spiritually captive by a dominant secular worldview that is
itself sensing its own mortality, such worldview education
must be prophetic and will generally be characterized by a
spiritual battle-a conflict with principalities and powers.
From a biblical perspective, worldview education is a matter
of life and death.
3) The prayed-for objective of such education is
nothing less than a transforming vision of and for life-a
setting students free from cultural captivity and blind
service to the dominant idols so that they can have opened
eyes to new and radical paths of Kingdom obedience.
4) Such an educational vision could put a liberal arts
college on a collision course with the very community that
gave it birth and that supports the work of the college.
Consequently, a worldview-focused educational vision
requires the courage to take up a prophetic role in the
community-not by angry denunciation but by passionate
proclamation.
5) Insofar as a worldview-focused education is
25
concerned with wholistic knowing55 and insofar as a
Christian worldview discerns the idolatrous character of
fallen humanity, a Christian liberal arts college must have
grave concern (philosophically and pedagogically) with both
narrow specialism and single-minded careerism or a
vocational focus for college education. Consequently,
6) Worldview education will be self-consciously
interdisciplinary in character, attempting to open the
student to the breadth of human thought, culture and
experience in terms of an integral Christian perspective.
The primary goal of such education is to help the student to
learn and follow Wisdom, and it is only in this context that
specialized theoretical research or certain vocational
training can occur.
7) Insofar as a worldview is integral, the kind of
education, theorizing and vocational life that it will
engender will be integrated-therefore, the integration of
faith with learning, faith with theory, and faith with
careers is the goal of a Christian liberal arts college.
And while such integration is never fully achieved (which is
simply to say that sanctification is an ongoing process),
our goal must be to make Christian learning a reality56 and
disciple Christian biologists, sociologists, philosophers,
doctors, lawyers, politicians, artists and engineers.
Discipleship to Jesus Christ requires nothing less.
Let me give you some examples of what I mean here. A
Christian college concerned with worldview-focused education
26
could very well develop a MBA program, but the goal and
purpose for developing such a program would not primarily be
to train our young people to be successful in the corporate
world. Rather, our goal would be to develop the tools that
are needed to do business in a way that is stewardly,
environmentally sensitive and concerned with sharing the
resources of creation with all people-but especially the
poor. We need to be training economists who will understand
the patterns of oppression, the nature of work, the
relationship between war and business, and the call to
stewardship. We need to train engineers who will develop
technology that is appropriate to the needs of our times and
the limits of our resources; biologists who will give us
guidance in a world choked by industrial pollution and
impoverished by an ever-increasing rate of species
extinction; and sociologists and philosophers and
theologians of culture who can help us understand and deal
with the social crises that we now experience and that will
be compounded in the future. And we need to nurture in a
worldview-focused education a generation of novelists,
poets, film-writers, actors, musicians and composers who
will break through both the commercialization of the arts in
our culture and the narrow evangelization of the arts common
among Christians, and find new ways to open our lives up
aesthetically and give wise expression to a Christian view
of life in the their art. This leads to the next thesis:
8) Insofar as a worldview is not only a vision of the
27
world but also a vision for the world, then
worldview-focused education must be education for cultural
praxis. As Paulo Freire and Thomas Groome have taught us,
education can have, and should have, liberative power in the
lives of those who are being educated and in the culture as
a whole.57 Education for praxis is education which empowers
people for cultural action of reform and redirection.
Following Nicholas Wolterstorff, we need to move beyond
cognitive learning (of data and theories, and even the
conceptual contours of a Christian worldview) to tendency
learning-a learning for discipleship.58 This is worldview
education that takes seriously the vision-for character of
worldviews and avoids the intellectualistic reduction of
worldviews to mere conceptual visions of the world. We must
not only train students to think Christianly, but, in
dynamic relation to that thinking, to live Christianly. An
education for obedient cultural praxis is what Wolterstorff
has called an education directed to shalom.59
9) If we take socio-cultural praxis as a necessary
implication of a worldview-focused educational vision and if
we want to experience our theory and praxis as integrally
related, then a spiritual discernment of our present
socio-cultural context will guide us both in the theories we
adopt and the problems we choose to address.60
10) Insofar as a worldview is truly open to reality and
requires experiential validation if it is to be viable, it
is, by nature, in process-open to reform, correction,
28
redirection and refocusing. Consequently, a
worldview-focused education must also be characterized by
such openness. A canonized worldview results in a stifling
conservatism, scholasticism and separatism-none of which is
conducive to the atmosphere of a "liberal" arts college.
Being rooted in Jesus Christ gives one the courage to say
that we don't have all the answers, nor do we need them.
The world is in process and so is our worldview. It is in
this context that both faculty and students can experience
the academic freedom they have in Christ.61 And finally,
11) Worldviews are communal and therefore a
worldview-focused Christian liberal arts college is to
function as a community-the center of which is worship and
service to Jesus Christ which naturally leads to a communal
sharing of ideas and insights, and a struggling together to
discern where God is leading us as educators at the end of
the twentieth century, and indeed, at the end of the
Enlightenment.
Notes
1George Marsden, "The State of Evangelical Christian
Scholarship," Christian Scholar's Review, XVII, 4 (June
1988), p. 355.
2For an introduction to Kuyper's view of Calvinism as a
"world and life view" see his Princeton Stone lectures of
1889, Lectures on Calvinism (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans,
29
1931), especially chapter 1.
3(Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1947). For a more recent
statement from Henry on these matters see his book, The
Christian Mindset in a Secular Society: Promoting
Evangelical Renewal and National Righteousness (Portland,
OR: Multnomah Press, 1984).
4See Marsden, "The State of Evangelical Christian
Scholarship," p. 352.
5See Francis Schaeffer, The God Who Is There (Downers
Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1968).
6James Sire, The Universe Next Door (Downers Grove, IL:
InterVarsity Press, 1976); 2nd ed, 1988).
7See Norman Geisler and William Watkins, Perspectives:
Understanding and Evaluating Today's World Views (San
Bernardino, CA: Here's Life Publishers, 1984). A similar
critique would seem to be applicable to W.A. Hoffecker and
G. S. Smith, eds., Building a Christian Worldview,
Vol 1: God, Man and Knowledge (Phillipsburg, NJ:
Presbyterian and Reformed Publishing Co., 1986).
8I have raised this critique in a review article, "Two
Books on the Christian Mind," in Anakainosis 2, 1 (September
1979): 9-13. While Arthur Holmes is diligent in this
Contours of a Worldview (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1983)
to insist that worldviews are "prephilosophical" (p. 31) and
to investigate the cultural implications of a Christian
worldview (Part III), even his description of the Christian
worldview and its rivals tends to be overly theoretical. A
30
similar critique could be leveled at Al Wolters' otherwise
very helpful book, Creation Regained: Biblical Basics for a
Reformational Worldview (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1985).
9James Sire, Discipleship of the Mind (Downers Grove,
IL: InterVarsity Press, 1990). R.C. Sproul's Lifeviews:
Understanding the Ideas that Shape Society Today (Old
Tappan, NJ: Fleming H. Revell Co., 1986) makes similar
attempts to discern the social influence of worldviews but
also seems to have a rather intellectualistic understanding
of worldviews.
10For a more nuanced discussion of the historical use of
the term see Al Wolters, "On the Idea of Worldview and Its
Relation to Philosophy" in Paul Marshall, Sander Griffioen
and Richard Mouw, eds., Stained Glass: Worldviews and
Social Science, Christian Studies Today Series (Lanham, MD:
University Press of America, 1989), pp. 14-25.
11It is important to note here that referring to
worldviews as pre-theoretical is itself indicative of the
role of theorizing in the Western worldview. It is
precisely the overemphasis on reason and theory-making in
the Western consciousness that makes it necessary to
highlight the pre-theoretical character of worldviews.
12A. Irving Hallowell, "Ojibwa Ontology, Behaviour and
World View," in S. Diamond, ed., Culture in History (New
York: Columbia University Press, 1960), pp. 19-52, as cited
by Thomas W. Overholt and J. Baird Callicott, Clothed in Fur
and Other Takes: An Introduction to an Ojibwa Worldview
31
(Washington, D.C.: University Press of America, 1982), p.
xi.
13Langdon Gilkey, Society and the Sacred: Toward a
Theology of Culture in Decline (New York: Crossroad, 1981),
p. 43. I have discussed Gilkey's understanding of the
religion/culture relation at some length in Langdon Gilkey:
Theologian for a Culture in Decline, Christian Studies Today
Series (Lanham, New York and London: University Press of
America, 1991), ch. 3. The philosophical foundations of
Gilkey's approach are discussed and critiqued in my article,
"The Dimension of Ultimacy and Theology of Culture: A
Critical Discussion of Langdon Gilkey," Calvin Theological
Journal 24, 1 (April 1989): 66-92.
14Christian Scholars Review XIV, 2 (1985): 153-64. This
article also appears in Stained Class (see note 10 above):
26-40.
15Christian Scholars Review, p. 155.
16On the centrality of story in worldview formation, see
Stanley Hauerwas, A Community of Character: Toward a
Constructive Christian Social Ethic (Notre Dame and London:
University of Notre Dame Press, 1981), especially parts 1
and 2. In my inaugural lecture, Who Turned Out the Lights:
The Light of the Gospel in a Post-Enlightenment Culture
(Toronto: Institute for Christian Studies, 1989), I refer to
worldviews as "storied visions of and for life."
17Gilkey, Society and the Sacred, p. 23.
18Christopher Dawson, Progress and Religion: An
32
Historical Inquiry (New York: Sheed and Ward, 1938);
Reinhold Niebuhr, The Nature and Destiny of Man, Vol. II
(New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1943); Bob Goudzwaard,
Capitalism and Progress, translated by Josina Van Nuis
Zylstra (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1979); J.B. Bury, The
Idea of Progress: An Inquiry into its Origin and Growth
(London: Macmillan, 1920).
19Society and the Sacred, p. 24. Gilkey also discusses
the notion of progress in Reaping the Whirlwind: A
Christian Interpretation of History (New York: Seabury,
1976): part 1.
20See the present author's book (co-authored with J.
Richard Middleton), The Transforming Vision: Shaping a
Christian Worldview (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press,
1984), ch. 2.
21Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures (New
York: Basic Books, 1973), p. 93.
22James W. Fowler, "Moral Stages and the Development of
Faith," in B. Munsey, ed., Moral Development, Moral
Education and Kohlberg (Birmingham: Religious Education
Press, 1980), p. 134.
23See Langdon Gilkey, Religion and the Scientific Future
(New York: Harper and Row, 1970), ch. 2.
24See Stephen Toulmin, An Examination of the Place of
Reason in Ethics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1961), chapter 14. Toulmin's notion of limit questions has
been employed in theology by Landgon Gilkey, Naming the
33
Whirlwind: The Renewal of God-Language (New York:
Bobbs-Merrill Co., 1969), Part II, chapters 2 and 3; and
David Tracy, Blessed Rage for Order: The New Pluralism in
Theology [A Crossroad Book (New York: Seabury Press, 1975)],
chapters 5 and 7.
25See Nicholas Wolterstorff, Reason Within the Bounds of
Religion (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1976), especially
chapter 9. For an insightful discussion of the role of such
committed beliefs in science, with specific reference to
Kuhn, Polanyi and Radnitzky, see Clarence Joldersma's
published M.Phil.F thesis, Beliefs and the Scientific
Enterprise (Toronto: Institute for Christian Studies, 1983).
26Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations
(Oxford: Blackwell, 1967): section 217.
27See especially chapter 2.
28See Paul Tillich's notion of ultimate concern in
Dynamics of Faith (New York: Harper and Row, 1957), chapter
1; and Systematic Theology I (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1951), pp. 11-15.
29Cf. Psalm 115 and Romans 1:20-25. Bob Goudzwaard
discusses the dynamics of idolatry in modern culture in
Idols of Our Time, translated by Mark VanderVennen (Downers
Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1984). See also Pablo
Richard et al., The Idols of Death and the God of Life (New
York: Orbis, 1983).
30This is what Middleton and I have called the criterion
of coherence. Transforming Vision, p. 38.
34
31Middleton and I call this the reality criterion-is the
worldview really a world view? See Transforming Vision, p.
37.
32James Olthuis, "On Worldviews," pp. 156-7.
33See Paul Ricoeur, Freud and Philosophy: An Essay on
Interpretation, translated by Denis Savage (New Haven and
London: Yale University Press, 1970), pp. 32-36; and The
Conflict of Interpretations, Don Ihde, ed. (Evanston:
Northwestern University Press, 1974), pp. 148-50.
34Thomas Kuhn also speaks of conversion in the context
of paradigm shifts in scientific research. See The
Structure of Scientific Revolutions, rev. ed. (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1962), pp. 147, 149-50, 157.
35I have addressed the difficulties of the
worldview/way-of-life gap within the Christian community at
greater length in Subversive Christianity: Imaging God in a
Dangerous Time (Bristol, UK: Regius Press, 1992), especially
ch. 2.
36Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures, p. 99.
37It is something of this experience of anxiety that
Jean-Paul Sartre captured in his novel Nausea, translated by
Lloyd Alexander (New York: New Directions, 1959).
38Jeremy Rifkin (with Ted Howard), The Emerging Order:
God in the Age of Scarcity (New York: G.P. Putnam's Sons,
1979), p. 212.
39Arnold Toynbee referred to such periods as "times of
troubles," in A Study of History (London: Oxford University
35
Press), I (1934), p. 53; and IV (1939), pp. 1-5. See
Langdon Gilkey, "Theology for a Time of Troubles: How My
Mind has Changed," Christian Century 98 (April 29, 1981):
474-80.
40Robert Heilbroner, An Inquiry into the Human Prospect
(New York: W. W. Norton and Co., 1974).
41I have addressed the decline of modernity at greater
length in The Transforming Vision, ch. 9, Langdon Gilkey,
ch. 3, and Subversive Christianity, chs. 2 and 3.
42In an interview on the Canadian Broadcasting
Corporation.
43Daniel Bell, The Cultural Contradictions of
Capitalism, 2nd ed. (London: Heineman, 1979), pp. 29-30.
44Ibid.
45The present crisis of modernity has led to such
responses of reformation. See Charles Taylor's defense of
the Enlightenment preoccupation of "authenticity" in a way
that attempts to go beyond modernity's debasement of the
notion in The Malaise of Modernity (Toronto: Anansi, 1991).
46See Walter Brueggemann's notion of "reorientation" in
The Message of the Psalms: A Theological Commentary
(Minneapolis: Augsburg, 1984).
47Postmodernity is characterized by such a quest for a
new worldview that will serve to integrate life after the
disintegration of modernity. Radical postmodernism such as
deconstructionism, however, claims to have totally abandoned
any attempts at worldviews with their totality concepts and
36
meta-narratives. While I cannot argue this point at length
here, it is my contention that worldviews are
anthropologically constitutive and that the attempt to
totally abandon worldviews will either fail outright or will
ideologically import an unexamined worldview in the back
door. For a helpful introduction to postmodernism see Linda
Hutcheon, The Politics of Postmodernism (London and New
York: Routledge, 1989). The last chapter of this book is
illustrative of my point. For Hutcheon the one thing that
is not subject to deconstruction is feminism. A more
popular introduction can be found in Walter Truett Anderson,
Reality Isn't What it Used to Be (New York: Harper and Row,
San Francisco, 1990).
48Herman Kahn, "The Economic Future," in Frank Feather,
ed., Through the 80's: Thinking Globally Acting Locally
(Washington: D.C.: World Futures Society, 1980), p. 208.
49See Paul's wonderful Christological poem in Colossians
1:15-20. In Christ "all things" are created and all things
"are being reconciled." Wolters emphasizes this
comprehensiveness in Creation Regained.
50For a helpful critique of dualism written at a popular
level see Steve Shaw, No Splits (London: Marshall, Morgan
and Scott, 1989).
51See Os Guiness' creative, yet disturbing, portrayal of
the modern church in The Gravedigger File: Papers on the
Subversion of the Church (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity
Press, 1983).
37
52See Wesley Granberg-Michaelson, A Worldly
Spirituality: The Call to Take Care of the Earth (San
Francisco: Harper and Row, 1984); and Loren Wilkenson, et
al., Earthkeeping in the 90's: Stewardship of Creation
(Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1991).
53See Middleton and Walsh, The Transforming Vision, chs.
8 and 9.
54See Walter Brueggemann, The Prophetic Imagination
(Philadelphia: Fortress, 1978).
55Or what Michael Polanyi called tacit knowing in
contrast with focal or theoretical knowing in The Tacit
Dimension (Garden City, NJ: Doubleday, 1966).
56See the helpful book edited by Harold Heie and David
L. Wolfe, The Reality of Christian Learning (Grand Rapids,
MI: Christian University Press and Eerdmans, 1987).
57Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed (New York:
Continuum, 1970); Thomas Groome, Christian Religious
Education (New York: Harper and Row, 1980).
58Nicholas Wolterstorff, Educating for Responsible
Action (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1980), especially
chapters 1 and 2.
59Nicholas Wolterstorff, "Teaching for Justice," in Joel
A. Carpenter and Kenneth W. Shipps, eds., Making Higher
Education Christian (St. Paul: Christian University Press,
1987), pp. 201-16.
60Again, Wolterstorff has been most helpful in
addressing the question of praxis in educational practice.
38
See his chapter on "Theory and Praxis" in Until Peace and
Justice Embrace (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1983), ch. 8;
and his 1982 convocation address at Wheaton College, "The
Mission of the Christian College at the End of the Twentieth
Century," Reformed Journal 33, 6 (June 1983): 14-8.
61A helpful discussion of academic freedom in the
context of biblical fidelity is found in Frank Anthony
Spina, "Revelation, Reformation, Re-Creation: Canon and the
Theological Foundation of the Christian University,"
Christian Scholar's Review XVIII, 4 (June 1989): 315-32.
39